I do not use social media myself, but I saw that story as it was posted here. I get the feeling that there was some bad behaviour in that particular case (while Kardashian at least has some humans).

The t-shirt account can't get past 200 comments with 2.6 million followers? Sub-0.001% engagement screams purchased followers - you typically get more than that in spam comments or shoutout-begging alone most of the time I've seen if they are humans...

I am also inclined to believe this even more so due to scrolling through the follower list for under a minute, based off usernames. Another thing is that while scrolling through, some hypermajority appear to be either India, Middle Eastern, or CIS countries, while she has never written a description in any of those - possibly the vendor was also difficult to order from or ship outside of the US or her home country otherwise.

how long before AI powered "engagement" bot nets get good enough to pass the extremely low Turing test bar required of IG follower comments?

I suspect AI wouldn't even be needed, just harvest real comments from existing high engage feeds and dump them with minor word swaps on to low engage feeds. this alone would probably take a couple years for countermeasures to respond to, assuming there is even an incentive basis to respond at all.

2 years ago, at least

why do you need AI? just end your sentence with #f4f #followback

That story needs a * because you don't know how good the t shirts were or if they were targeted to their audience.

You also dont know how good or effective the cosmetics are

You might not know how good the cosmetics are until you buy them. But whether a t-shirt fits your style is plainly visible (unless they were selling plain tees). Very different product categories

I'm skeptical that the company is worth a real billion.

a cursory glance at her revenue ($300M in 2016) shows that it probably is. And this is cosmetics so, mostly profit. There are SV startups losing more than that and worth many many billions.